Katie Couric has lived in the public eye since 1991, when she began co-hosting the Today Show on NBC. While she’s built a career on her unflappable on-screen presence, she says that same journalistic rationality served her poorly when crisis hit closer to home. In 1998, her husband, John Paul “Jay” Monahan, died of colon cancer at 42. Katie says her reluctance to accept the inevitable conclusion of his diagnosis is something she regrets. “I really tried to not fall apart in front of Jay, and looking back on it, there’s probably a lot of dishonesty about the whole thing,” she says. “I think that sort of cockeyed optimism prevented me from ever really saying goodbye.”

After Jay’s death, Katie parented their daughters alone until 2014, when she married her second husband, John Paul Molner. While her two husbands share a name, Katie says there’s a lot that differentiates the two marriages. “I’m in a different phase of my life,” she told me. “The horizon isn’t quite as far as it was when I married Jay.”

Katie turned 60 years old this year, and says it was more emotionally difficult than she expected. “Half my life is over. It’s been a little a little depressing for me,” she said. But, she admitted, you’d never know it from looking at her Instagram feed. “You can give people the impression that you’re a fairly one-dimensional happy person,” she says, “when the truth of the matter is it’s much much more complicated than that.”